Look at bigger picture

Published 9:42 pm, Monday, January 7, 2013

It's become a rite in Washington: An enormous storm or other disaster strikes, state and local officials cry out for aid, and members of Congress fight over how much and where to find the money.

The latest example is the brouhaha over a Senate bill to provide $60 billion in emergency funds to respond to Superstorm Sandy and other recent calamities. With the cost of such disasters growing, the country needs a better approach — one that does more to discourage the development of particularly vulnerable areas of the country and sets aside more realistic amounts to pay for damage that can't be anticipated or avoided.

Sandy's destruction was so great — property insurance claims alone are expected to be $25 billion — that even the House GOP leadership dropped its usual demand to offset the spending with cuts elsewhere in the budget. Instead, the House balked at the amount of spending in the bill, especially the roughly $2 billion for regions not affected by Sandy and about $33 billion aimed at girding for future catastrophes.

Considering the frequency of multibillion-dollar disasters in recent years, governments should devote more resources to preparing for disasters, not less. But those efforts should be a priority within the administration's budget request, not tacked onto emergency funding bills.

Congress took an important step to discourage development in risky areas last year when it rewrote the rules for the federal flood insurance program, ending counterproductive subsidies for new buildings in flood-prone areas and for existing buildings that had suffered repeated flooding. Now, it needs to promote the same kind of sensitivity to risk broadly, so that state and local governments take a firmer stance against development that ignores the risk of wildfires, hurricanes, floods and earthquakes.